Kyocera Mita FS-C5025N review

Kyocera Mita's Ecosys laser printers tend to have very low running costs, but they aren't cheap to buy in the first place.

Until the launch of the £531 FS-C5015N and the FS-C5025N reviewed here, the company's most affordable colour laser cost over £1,000. At £671 the FS-C5025N doesn't compete with mainstream entry-level models such as the Epson AcuLaser C1100 or HP's Colour LaserJet 1600, but it's well within the price range of a small office. As you might expect for this price, it's a heavy-duty printer, designed for printing an average 10,000 pages a month.

As with Kyocera Mita's other Ecosys products, the printer's toner and developer are guaranteed, in this case to the earliest of 200,000 pages or for three years. During this time, you'll need to replace only the toners, each of which lasts for 8,000 pages. If you print fewer than 200,000 pages, each mono page will cost around 0.8p, and each colour page only 3.6p. Every 200,000 pages you'll need a £529 maintenance pack, but as you can see from the figures in our graph, the printer is still cheap to run when you include this cost.

Like some other Kyocera Mita printers we've reviewed, the FS-C5025N isn't particularly easy to set up. Fitting the four, 4,000-page starter toners and a waste toner bottle is straightforward enough, but it made a harsh buzzing sound while preparing itself for its first print. Fortunately, this didn't happen during any of our print tests. The menu system seems to beep more than strictly necessary, too.

We found the install program comparatively hard to fathom. The FS-C5025N didn't appear in the 'Select your Kyocera model' list. While the FS-C5020N driver installed and worked, we downloaded the correct FS-C5025N driver to perform our tests.

The installer couldn't detect the printer across our network, so we had to manually add and configure a TCP/IP print port. You need to know the correct IP address to do this, but the printer didn't automatically print a configuration sheet during the setup process. We had to use its menu to print a status page, which includes network information.

The FS-C5025N is a single-pass printer, so it can create colour pages more quickly than a typical entry-level colour laser. Even so, it's not particularly fast when printing in colour or black only. Though it managed to print 50 copies of our formal letter at a rate of 19.2 pages per minute (ppm), it paused for calibration for more than 15 seconds during our Draft Speed test, giving a disappointing result. It reached nearly 8ppm on our colour Normal test. Though this is a fair rate, it's some way behind the fastest competitors, such as Dell's Colour Laser Printer 5110cn, reviewed in What's New, Shopper October 2006, which managed an impressive 12.1ppm.

Print quality was fair, with reasonably accurate colours, though we noticed that colour and black elements weren't perfectly aligned on the page. Black text looked fine to the naked eye, but outlines were quite soft when magnified and very small text sizes were messy. This printer has a 500-sheet input cassette and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. Frustratingly, neither of them is marked with any paper orientation, so it's a challenge to print an envelope or on both sides of each sheet of paper. It can be expanded with a huge range of options that include warranty upgrades, a cabinet, hard disk storage and an envelope feeder. This could help you tailor it to a specific role, or allow the printer to keep pace with changing requirements.